JOHN BUELL

Lessons Across the Pond

If the Bush administration's denunciations of the old Europe often
are overdrawn and even a source of future embarrassment, liberals and
the left are not immune from periodic overdoses of Europhilia. Like
adolescents everywhere, many Americans of both left and right can
hardly figure out what to make of their parents. Perhaps part of
growing up is moving from extremes of rage or adulation to a more
nuanced exchange of views. This should include the willingness to
acknowledge that important deficiencies exist in ample measure on
both sides of the pond.

For the Bush administration, Europe was the thorn in its side
before the war. The administration subtly accused Western European
nations of a flabby appeasement of aggression reminiscent of the days
leading up to the Second World War. Yet more recently, the Bush
administration finds itself going hat-in-hand to European governments
seeking financial and military support in the management of its
recalcitrant colony.

Liberals and the left applauded the massive European
demonstrations against the war in the days before the invasion. Yet
what is one to make of these demonstrations? However unpopular the
war may have been in Europe, many of those same nations now seem more
eager to get a piece of the new Iraqi business and oil supplies than
really to curb the new imperialism. And however unpopular the war may
be among the general population, the British government now welcomes
President Bush as a guest. Both Italy and Spain, despite widespread
opposition to the war, are governed by staunch Bush allies. The new
US and the old Europe seem to have one important trait in common. The
US has a minority president, and popular sentiments on an issue as
important as war hardly seem to matter to several major European
heads of state.

For Bush and his business allies, the old Europe is a whipping
boy along other lines. European determination to provide a safety net
for unemployed workers and broad union protection occasions
inflexible, unproductive, and uncompetitive labor markets. Liberals
and the left can provide several rejoinders to this conventional
view. I will discuss these more fully in a future commentary. But
however one-sided this perspective may be, liberals do need to
acknowledge that many of these protections are under siege in Europe
itself. The social democratic parties that have achieved these gains
are in ideological retreat. To some degree the traditional social
democratic combination of social democracy at home and free trade
within the world economy has put immense pressure on the social
democracies.

The social democracies still stand up well against United States
in a couple regards. The tendency to marginalize and denigrate the
poor is much less prevalent throughout most of Western Europe. In
addition, the obsessive focus on the use of recreational drugs and
sexual mores of US political leaders is a subject of amusement and
scorn in much of Western Europe.

But one should not infer from this that scapegoating or
demonization of some sectors of the population does not play a major
role in Europe. Put aside the anti-Semitic atrocities of the 20th
century and one still encounters a harsh and growing nationalism and
Eurocentrism throughout Western Europe. For much of Western Europe,
the so-called Arab has become almost as much the feared other as in
United States. Even in such paragons of social democracy as the
Netherlands, rhetoric abounds to suggest that Holland is full.
European welfare states were built around the robust commitments to
the nation and national identity.

Yet the levels of immigration, both legal and illegal, remain
relatively small and hostility to immigration flies in the face of
labor market shortages and demographic trends suggesting a need for
new younger workers. Rather than bash immigrants, Europeans need to
be working toward internationalizing not only labor standards but
immigration and naturalization procedures as well. And each task is
important to the other. Building common labor standards requires
collaboration among labor organizations that must come to see each
other as fellow human beings even as they practice distinctive ethnic
and religious heritages. And without adequate standards preventing a
race to the bottom, demonization of immigrants and minorities is as
likely to proceed apace in Europe as in the United States.

Nor should Europeans take too much comfort in their prescient
opposition to the war. They were clearly right to oppose unilateral
US intervention. But those who counterposed the question: what is the
alternative also had a point. Joseph Stalin once famously asked how
many divisions has the pope? European nations seeking to play a
peacekeeping role in the world currently do not have the
institutional or military mechanisms to fulfill that task. They find
themselves paradoxically relying on the goodwill and might of US.

A new system of world governments is not in the offing anytime
soon, but labor, peace, and grassroots activists can work across
borders to pressure their governments to address these failures. They
will be most successful if they acknowledge that no one has a
monopoly on models for equitable political economies.